Pakistan represents some of the rockiest and least-promising soil for democracy, given its poverty, the illiteracy of half of its 160 million citizens and the manner in which extremists antagonize the peaceful majority. So the Pakistan People’s Party, admired in the West as Pakistan’s best hope for democracy, has outsourced the job to a 19-year-old student at Oxford.

Bilawal Zardari, son of the slain Benazir Bhutto, has agreed to serve as the PPP’s new chairman, although Benazir’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, will handle some day-to-day business while Bilawal wraps up his studies.

This would be a shocking development if not for the fact that the PPP has been a nepotistic vehicle for the Bhuttos’ personal ambitions since former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto founded it 40 years ago.

Zulfikar demonstrated his commitment to Western-style democracy by limiting his citizenry’s civil liberties, physically threatening colleagues who disagreed with him, opposing capitalism, pandering to Islamists and hanging onto power at any cost to his nation. He also launched Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program in the face of U.S. opposition, declaring that his nation would “eat grass” if it that was necessary to fund the program.

Forced from office before being executed for allegedly conspiring to murder an opponent, Zulfikar handed the leadership of the PPP in 1977 to his Iranian wife – the first compelling sign that he saw Pakistani leadership as a family affair.

Leadership shifted a few years later to their daughter Benazir, who would be sworn in for the first time as prime minister in 1988, be tossed out for corruption two years later, then reclaim power in 1993. In her second stint, before she opposed the Taliban she supported the Taliban, to paraphrase John Kerry; this helped them rise to power in neighboring Afghanistan. She changed her tune after 9/11, accusing Pervez Musharraf as being a pawn of the very Taliban and related extremists whom she had failed to rein in.

She micromanaged her party from exile, then returned this fall to Pakistan to rescue it from dictatorship by, well, agreeing to consider sharing power with the dictator so long as he threw out the credible corruption charges against her family. (One person who had broken from the family cult, Fatima Bhutto, penned a Los Angeles Times opinion piece in November about “the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt.”)

Western observers missed a clue to Benazir’s core intentions, given that her autobiography was titled “Daughter of Destiny.” The term captures the messiah complex at the heart of the Bhutto cult, the sense that the Bhuttos’ fall and vindication was the grand narrative that would inspire Pakistan’s larger redemption.

This message played well with some downtrodden citizens and with her well-mobilized army of favor-seeking cronies, but she was deeply unpopular with much of the nation, as was her father.

Policy interests demand that we move beyond the mourning process: The Bhutto family refined and defined the façade of the leader we would want in Pakistan, but it was just that – a façade.

The tragedy is indeed significant, but the sentimentalism offered by American television coverage was overwrought. While waiting at one cable network’s Los Angeles studio last week to discuss a newspaper column I’d written about the subprime mortgage meltdown, I watched the monitors with puzzlement as the hosts discussed the saintly mission of Benazir.

Yet now, in the form of a young man who has spent most of his short life outside Pakistan, we now have the sharpest, clearest rebuttal to the notion that the Bhutto family represents the best interests of the Pakistani people.

Benazir intended in her will to pass party control to her husband, Zardari. Given Zardari’s notoriety and prison record, he opted for a lower profile (while retaining significant control) by handing the chairmanship to a college student who is not old enough to order a beer in many places. And he announced that his son would henceforth be known as Bilawal Bhutto Zardari.

PPP leaders compliantly chanted, “Long live Bilawal Bhutto.” In fact, a PPP eyewitness reported that Benazir’s final words before Thursday’s shooting were similar: “Long Live Bhutto.”

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